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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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And you still can't self certify.
It's cute the big players are so concerned with my little security of my little home server.
Or is there a bigger plan behind all this? Like pay more often, lock in to government controlled certs (already done I guess because they control DNS and you must have a "real" website name to get a free cert)?
I feel it's 50% security 50% bullshit.
Edit: thank you all I will dive down the CA certification rabbit hole now! Have worked in C++ & X509 on the client side so maybe I'll be able to figure it out.
You can absolutely run your own CA and even get your friends to trust it.
Yes you can but the practicality of doing so is very limiting. Hell I ran my own CA for my own internal use and even I found it annoying.
The entire CA ecosystem is terrible and only exists to ensure connections are encrypted at this point. There's no validation or any sort of authority to say one site is better than another.
But you have to manually accept this dangerous cert in the browser right?
Very interesting actually, do you have any experience about it or other pointers? I might just set one up myself for my tenfingers sharing protocol...
No, because it's no longer dangerous if it's trusted.
You give your friends your public root and if applicable, intermediary certs. They install them and they now trust any certs issued by your CA.
Source: I regularly build and deploy CA's in corps
Thank you!
Is there some simple soft that let you make those certs, like with a root cert and then "derived" certs? On linux :-) ?
I guess people have to re-trust every now and then because certs get old, or do they trust the (public partof the) root cert and the daughter certs derived from root are churned out regularly for the sites?
Openssl can do everything.
That's right, but instead of the word derived we use "issued"
Correct certs get old by design, they can also be revoked. As another commenter mentioned the biggest pain is actually in the redistribution of these end certificates. In enterprise this is all managed usually with the same software they use for deployment or have auto enrollment configured.
You should find tons of guides just take it slow to understand it all. Understanding certificates in depth is a rare and good skill to have. Most sysadmins I come across are scared to death of certificates.
I was forced to learn some of it at work (using and signing medical payment transactions, with x509 certificates) so I have ar least a starting point. I have no idea how the revoke process works though, I can't figure out a way that it functions without a central authority getting queried regularly. I thonk I can start without that knowledge though.
Anyway, with your information I'm up and running, thank you again!
"Derived certificates" not child certs, noted !
It's pretty simple to set up. Generate CA, keep key and other private stuff stored securely, distribute public part of CA to whoever you want and sign all the things you wish with your very own CA. There's loads of howtos and tools around to accomplish that. The tricky part is that manual work is needed to add that CA to every device you want to trust your certificates.
Thank you! This is actually precisely what I need, you IT guys are the best!
No that's the point. If you import the CA certificate on your browser, any website that uses a cert that was signed by that CA will be trusted and accessible without warning.
not all phones support manually adding certs
Which phones. Android and iOS could.
I don't know about iOS, but Android had support for this in the past. Now the support is partial. It's no longer possible to install system-level certificates. Or at least they made it extremely inconvenient.
That's a complaint about those phones not PKI in general then. Though it's surprising their enterprise support won't let you since that is (or was) a fairly common thing for businesses to do.
That's a fair point. However, on the practical side, it's sad that I would have to root my gf's phone to let her access the services we host.
I ended up using a DynDNS and Caddy for managing my cert.
Technically something like DANE can allow you to present DNSSEC-backed self-signed certs and even allow multi-domain matching that removes the need for SNI and Encrypted Client Hello... but until the browsers say it is supported, it's not
At some point there was a browser extension to support DANE (and Perspectives and similar approaches against centralization) but since then, browser vendors fixed that security flaw.
Skill issue, you've always been able to self certify. You just have to know where to drop the self signed cert or the parent/root cert you use to sign stuff.
If you're running windows, it's trivial to make a self signed cert trusted. There's an entire certificate store you can access that makes it easy enough you can double click it and install it and be on your way. Haven't had a reason to figure it out on Linux, but I expect it won't be super difficult.
I already did but my browser choked on it.
So yes I should probably set up the whole CA thing.